Checkout Page Optimisation

Usually, when you ask e-commerce strategists and website managers what is the most important page on their online shop, they would certainly reply that it’s a money page. A page that undoubtedly drives money to your business is an e-commerce checkout page. However, this page is wrongly neglected in the design optimization process. It can be left out from the UX design checks and testing. However, since your customers need an online purchasing experience as smooth as possible, neglecting a checkout page is a mistake. Read our expert tips on how to do a checkout page optimisation for your webshop to make your customers as pleased as possible.

How to optimize an e-commerce checkout page?

Optimising an e-commerce checkout page is not significantly different from optimising any other money page on your website (such as landing pages, for example). Its goal is to drive money to your website and provide a comfortable purchasing experience. High cart abandonment is something you would definitely want to avoid if you’re selling your products online. A high cart abandonment rate can occur due to numerous reasons, but it all boils down to one thing: users are unwilling to invest their time to actually make a purchase. To reduce the cart abandonment rate, we actually need to facilitate the purchasing process for them.

Before you dig deeper and actually start optimising your checkout page, you need to conduct UX research to understand how your users feel about the checkout page. Is it too slow, insecure, confusing, with too many options, or without any options and useful information? Once you do your research, you will know what exactly the issue is, and can lay out some suggestions for page improvements.

Usually, optimisation of a checkout page is a task conducted by different team members, with different specialities. You usually need a UX designer, web developer, SEO specialist, and, in some cases, a QA tester. The collaboration of team members with different skills will contribute to the overall success of your e-commerce checkout page optimisation. Some of them will detect potential problems, while others will be in charge of solution implementation, and defining the best practices in web design.

Tips on optimising the checkout page design

Usually, issues with checkout pages are due to outdated design practices, which can’t compel make users make their purchases. Here are some tips on optimising your checkout page design in a way to be user-friendly, modern and secure:

1. Make the sign-in process super easy and straightforward – we want to help customers by making the purchasing process as seamless as possible. By that, we should avoid adding too many registration fields, too many options, links to other pages, too much text, and everything that can make the user experience not that pleasant and overwhelming. Also, if possible, create a one-page checkout, so the user experience can be as simple and quick as possible.
2. Provide top payment methods used in your market – give users the convenience of choosing the standard payment methods available for your target market. If needed, go an extra step by adding integrations with APIs required to use the online purchasing service.
3. Be transparent – provide enough info about shipping, shipping cost and speed. Also, give a summary overview of the users’ cart page, listing the type of product, variety, colour, size, and a number of products in the chart. Mention added cost if there is any.
4. Use Google autofill options – to make the users’ experience as seamless as possible, a useful option is to enable Google autofill. It can be very daunting to enter your email address, full name, and shipping address over and over, and modern buyers are purchasing online a lot these days.
5. Offer guest checkouts – if a customer is forced to create a new account, with account confirmation via an email click, it adds to the complexity of the purchasing process. Therefore, a very useful, and necessary convenience of a good checkout page is adding a guest checkout option.
6. Use exit pop-up – you can entice the shoppers with some personalised additional discounts if they head to the exit of the checkout page before completing a purchase.
7. Remove distractions – to make the purchasing experience as simple as possible, you can remove the menu navigation from the page, and all other internal links that are automatically displayed on regular pages, such as “Recent posts”, “Blog”, and “About us”, etc.
8. Add an upsell – enable a feature to show the related products that could go well with the product in the cart, ideally after the purchase is completed. It’s an additional chance to sell more products to the customers that already showed an interest in a similar product.
9. Make the processes secure – SSL is a must-have and a necessary requirement to have installed on your site, especially if you sell products online. Due to sharing sensitive credit card data, all data transfer needs to be encrypted, and SSL serves that purpose. Also, help customers understand that the purchasing process is secure, by adding the labels on the checkout page such as “Secure purchase”, “100% secure”, etc.
10. Check if your mobile checkout page is responsive – Never optimise only for desktop. In fact, mobile web design becomes more important, as people scroll from their phones more than ever. Test how a checkout page is displayed on mobile, whether is it fast, user-friendly, are all functionalities in place and working, etc.

How DesignQ can help

DesignQ creates modern and responsive e-commerce websites for seamless purchasing experience. We’ve been in business for more than 17 years, and we surely know how to create a customised and professional e-commerce site that your users will love.